Posts: release

A couple of weeks ago, I announced EndBASIC: a simple BASIC language interpreter written in Rust with a goal to provide an environment for teaching my kids how to code. That first release provided what-I-think-is a robust interpreter, but that was about it: the language features were still minimal and the interactive features were non-existent.
Well, EndBASIC 0.2.0 is here and things are changing! It’s still far from the vision I want to reach, but it’s slowly moving towards that direction.

Introducing EndBASIC, a new interpreter for a BASIC-like language that is inspired by Amstrad's Locomotive BASIC 1.1 and Microsoft's QuickBASIC 4.5. Like the former, EndBASIC intends to provide an interactive environment that seamlessly merges coding with immediate visual feedback. Like the latter, EndBASIC offers higher-level programming constructs and strong typing. The main idea behind EndBASIC is to provide a playground for learning the foundations of programming in a simplified environment.

The Shell Toolkit, or shtk for short, is a little project I introduced back in August of 2008 to support other tools such as sysbuild and sysupgrade. Since that time, the project has seen little activity because it did not have much to offer and because shtk's public interface was not documented (hence making it impossible for developers to get started with shtk).
Well, both are changing today with the brand-new release of shtk 1.

Yesterday was release day: I pushed out Lutok 0.3, Kyua Testers 0.2 and Kyua CLI 0.8.
There are not a lot of changes in these new releases. The reason I cut them was to publish the new TAP-compliant tester and make it available for use in FreeBSD as soon as possible. I will be using this new feature as part of the FreeBSD Test Suite in order to hook existing test programs without having to rewrite them to use the ATF libraries (or at least not as a first step).

Over a year ago, I developed two command line utilities for NetBSD (sysbuild and sysupgrade) and a supporting library for the two tools (shtk). These were all introduced in their corresponding blog posts —Introducing sysbuild for NetBSD, Introducing sysupgrade for NetBSD and Introducing shtk— and since then I have heard good comments about them.
About a couple of weeks ago, I started working on the much-needed rewrite of pkg_comp and a supporting standalone tool.

Lutok 0.3 was released yesterday evening. The packages in pkgsrc-current, Fedora 19 and Fedora rawhide have all been updated accordingly.
The major highlight of this new release is support for Lua 5.2 while retaining backwards compatibility with Lua 5.1. The incompatible changes between 5.1 and 5.2 only affected a small subset of the functionality in Lutok, which made this dual support possible.
For those that don't know what this project is about: Lutok is a lightweight C++ API for Lua.

Dear readers,
I am pleased to announce that Kyua 0.3 is available!
The major feature in this release is the introduction of the "test results store"; i.e. a SQLite3-based database that records all test execution activity so that reports can be gathered in a central machine and reports generated out of it. This is still very experimental and the generated reports are quite rudimentary, but is a first step towards this direction.

Dear users of NetBSD,
I am pleased to announce that we (well, the release engineering team!) have just tagged the netbsd-6 branch in the CVS repository and thus opened the gate for testing of NetBSD 6.0_BETA. New binary snapshots should start appearing in the daily FTP archive soon. You can, of course, perform a cvs update -r netbsd-6 on your existing source tree and roll your own binaries (as I'm already doing on my home server).

A few months ago, I introduced the Lutok project, a simple C++ API for Lua. To recap: the major goal of this API, which does not mimic the Lua C API bit by bit, is to enforce correct coding practices on the client side. This is done by (ab)using the RAII programming pattern to automatically free resources when not needed and to ensure that the Lua stack is correctly managed. The library also adheres to common C++ programming idioms and exposes exceptions for error management and uses the pimpl idiom to completely hide the Lua C API from clients of Lutok (unless you use the c_gate backdoor!

Dear readers,
I am very proud to announce the second formal release of Kyua, 0.2. This release comes with lots of internal changes and a few user-visible changes. Instead of listing all the changes and news here, I'll just recommend you to visit the 0.2 release page and read all the notes.
This release has been tested under NetBSD-current, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, Debian sid and Ubuntu 10.04.1 LTS.

Dear readers,
I'm very proud to announce that the very first release of Kyua, obviously numbered 0.1, has been published! The release page for kyua-cli-0.1 contains more details about what this release offers, and don't hesitate to join the kyua-discuss mailing list and ask if you have questions.
Kyua was started sometime in past October and it has taken over six months to get the first public version. (It is true that my free time has heavily fluctuated during this period though, so it does not mean that six months of intensive coding have gone into the release ;-) Kyua 0.